By: Katherine Tuominen, Catalyst Brand Strategy

Looking effortless has never involved so much effort. And as someone who works in health and wellness PR, I am professionally complicit.

A YouTuber I have followed for years recently announced she was giving up designer bags for “quiet luxury.” What that meant, in practice: weekly infrared sauna sessions, eleven skincare products applied before 7 am, a reformer Pilates membership that is, she acknowledged, “a bit of an investment.” The Balenciagas became a $400 facial. The aesthetic changed. The invoice did not.

I work in health and wellness PR. I help sell exactly this story. And I have been finding it increasingly hard to look away from what we are actually selling.

The wellness market has doubled since 2013. It is now worth $6.8 trillion and climbing toward $9.8 trillion by 2029. At some point, we have to ask: what is all of this really solving?

Lululemon actually commissioned research on this. Their Global Wellbeing Report found that nearly half of respondents feel overwhelmed by the pressure to maintain a wellness routine, a finding reported earnestly in the same wellness media that runs “7 morning habits that will change your life” every other Tuesday. We are exhausted by the content machine, and we keep clicking anyway. And spending. One in three Americans plans to increase their beauty and wellness spending in 2025, even as one in six already admits to spending more than they can afford.

Here is what the wellness industry figured out that the fashion industry eventually forgot: guilt converts better than aspiration. The “it bag” sold you status. The optimized morning routine sells you the idea that your current self is a problem in need of solving. Status is external and therefore optional. The version of yourself falling short of your potential is something that travels with you everywhere. The market is everywhere you are.

The standard we are holding ourselves to has never been higher, and we are the ones enforcing it. Show up glowing but unbothered. Thin but strong. Youthful but visibly effortless. Women spend an average of 39 minutes per day on their appearance. Men spend 22. That gap is 237 hours a year — nearly six full working weeks — spent achieving the appearance of someone who did not try particularly hard. And that figure triples for heavy social media users: research across 93 countries found that women who spend the most time on social media spend two hours more per day on appearance-enhancing behaviors than those who use it least. We have absorbed the expectation so completely that we are now constructing the routine ourselves and calling it self-care. Nobody asks the standard to come down. We just keep adding steps.

237 hours a year. Nearly six full working weeks spent achieving the appearance of someone who didn’t try. This is what effortless really costs.

This is an old story in new packaging. The beauty premium is real and extensively documented. Attractive people earn between ten and twenty percent more, are 52 percent more likely to reach prestigious positions, and are perceived as more competent and promotable before they say a word. We did not create the premium. The economy did. But the wellness industry handed us a way to internalize it beautifully. Rather than demanding the world value women beyond their appearance, we optimize the appearance. Rather than challenging the standard, we purchase compliance with it.

And we are paying twice. Products labeled “women’s” cost an average of 17 percent more than identical products marketed to men. Women earned 83 cents for every male dollar in 2024. We are earning less, spending more, working an extra six weeks a year on our faces, and one in three of us plans to spend even more next year. The pink tax is not a beauty industry quirk. It is structural gender economics with a moisturizer on top.

We earn 83 cents to the dollar. We pay 17 percent more for products with ‘women’s’ on the label. We spend six extra weeks a year on our appearance. And 62 percent of us judge other women’s looks more harshly than men do. We have thoroughly internalized this.

The wellness brief almost always contains some version of the same sentence: our customer is someone who takes her health seriously. What never makes it into the brief is the other half: she is also someone whose attention is being very deliberately courted by a $6.8 trillion industry with a commercial interest in her believing she is perpetually one product away from her best self. A woman who has arrived at her wellness goals is a woman who has stopped spending. The industry cannot afford for her to arrive.

The mental health cost is also no longer abstract. Research consistently shows that women with lower body esteem are less likely to take on leadership roles at work. Six in ten young women globally have opted out of social situations because of how they feel about their appearance. Nearly 70 percent of adult women report withdrawing from life activities because of body image concerns. The wellness industry will sell you something for that, too. A self-esteem supplement, a confidence ritual, a morning affirmation practice. The problem and the product, conveniently, have the same address.

This is a distraction as old as time, just sold back to us in a cleaner font. Women have always been encouraged to treat themselves as a project requiring constant improvement. The tools change. The pressure does not. A woman consumed by optimizing herself is a woman whose mental and physical resources are not being spent elsewhere. On the systems that created the beauty premium. On the policies that maintain the wage gap. On anything that does not have a SKU.

Truly opting out does not mean swapping a designer bag for a nicer serum and calling it growth. It means asking, occasionally, what you could do with those 237 hours and that extra $1,064 you are devoting to becoming a better-moisturized version of yourself. What might you solve if you stopped treating yourself as the problem?

The most radical wellness practice available right now is to stop treating your energy as something to be optimized and start treating it as something to be directed. At the world, which has a not-insignificant number of actual problems that would benefit from the attention of women not currently cataloguing their ceramide levels.

I will still wear sunscreen. I will still recommend excellent brands to excellent clients, with full transparency about the science and none of the manufactured inadequacy. But I will keep asking, as a publicist, founder of Catalyst Brand Strategy, and as a person, whether the story we are telling our audience is the story that actually serves them. Or just the one that sells.

Katherine Tuominen is a marketer and publicist specializing in health and wellness. She founded Catalyst Brand Strategy in 2021.